DUNGENESS LIGHTHOUSE
After passing the Goodwins the pilot of the southward-bound ship can sail
on with little to trouble him till he gets near Dungeness. That was a
very ‘nasty’ spot till marked by a lighthouse; the surrounding flatness
added to the dangers, for over the long stretches of shingle and sand
the steeple of Lydd Church rose up clear and distinct, looking in the
twilight to those at sea like ‘the forme of the saile of some talle
shippe’—so said the mariner of James I’s reign,—which led the steersman
to shape his course ‘confidently’ that way, with a result that, darkness
closing in, his ship would run upon the far-stretching sands with but
slender chance of getting off again in safety.
What light, if any, charity had maintained at or near Dungeness before
the dissolution of the monasteries we know not; but certainly for
long after it none was placed there, and shipwreck to an enormous
extent happened each winter; in one over a thousand lifeless bodies
of shipwrecked victims were collected at and near the ‘nesse,’ and
merchandise to the value of £100,000 perished there.
No wonder, then, that when, in the very early years of the seventeenth
century, lighthouse building began as a financial speculation, the
speculators hit upon Dungeness as a spot at which a lighthouse was
necessary and expedient. And it is wonderful to find that arguments were
seriously put forward against this project.
A little prior to the year 1616 Sir Edward Howard, one of the king’s
cup-bearers, built a lighthouse at Dungeness, and petitioned the crown
for leave to gather toll for its support. The Trinity House offered an
uncompromising opposition; nevertheless James I gave Sir Edward the
licence he sought. But Sir Edward found that the dues were paid with
reluctance, and was glad, ere long, to part with his interest in the
lighthouse to one William Lamplough, Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, on
whose behalf the crown, by its customs officers, interfered, directing
that the tolls should be paid.
That was too much for the shipowners and the Trinity House. They were,
in 1621, eagerly promoting a bill in Parliament for the ‘suppression’ of
the lighthouse, which they described as a nuisance to navigation; but
Parliament would not interfere with the king’s grantee, and the end of it
was that Lamplough was told by the crown that he must keep a better light
at Dungeness than he had lately done. The remonstrance was, no doubt,
needed; for it seems that the coal fire which at first had illuminated
the lighthouse had been replaced by a few candles, which were kept badly
‘snuffed’ and gave a wretchedly poor light.
But the opponents of lighthouses did not rest with the improvement in
the lights. The Trinity House continued to excite opposition, and the
corporation of Rye—quaint, sleepy old Rye, then very wide awake to its
own interests—seems to have considered it a favourable opportunity for
possessing itself of some one else’s property without paying for it. It
remembered that the first idea of a lighthouse at Dungeness emanated
from a townsman of Rye, and begged the gentleman at Lincoln’s Inn who
fought their legal battles for them, to draft a Bill to be prosecuted
in Parliament for vesting the title to the lighthouse in the mayor and
jurats of Rye, who promised to bestow the profits on the repair of their
much decayed harbour. That man of law was also a man of the world. In
acknowledging their instructions, he advised the jurats to ‘make Mr.
Speaker’ their ‘friend’; he evidently thought that so doing assisted
Parliamentary procedure considerably!
Perhaps the jurats neglected this sage advice: perhaps the price of
friendship was too high. The Bill was drafted, the man of law did his
part, but there the matter ended: the Bill remained a bud, it never
blossomed into an Act, and Lamplough’s patent again resisted attack;
he, in 1635, pulling down the then existing tower, and building one
altogether more substantial, that stood till a century ago, when the
lighthouse now there was erected.
We hear no more of the ‘hindrance’ and ‘inconveniency’ of Dungeness
lighthouse after this; its popularity was general, so much so that when,
in Cromwell’s time, the Earl of Thanet, who was the ground-landlord,
threatened the then owner, whose rent was in arrear, ‘to pull downe’
the structure, the latter did not pay, he only appealed to England’s
Protector, who held that it was not a fitting state of affairs that ‘the
safety of many lives and of the State’s ships should be left to the will
of the Earl of Thanet’—and he granted the owner protection.
After the Restoration there was a deal of squabbling over, and confusion
about, the title to Dungeness light. The former owner had forfeited his
right to it for adhering to the crown, and now the crown was once again
a power in the land, and the ‘Parliament man,’ to whom the lighthouse
land been given, would not quit, alleging a title by purchase; but into
all that the reader need not go. The only point in it that will interest
him is that at least one, probably more, of the Winstanley family had an
interest in the title. Can these Winstanleys have been ancestors of Henry
of Eddystone fame? If so, then we have, perhaps, a clue to what gave him
the idea of erecting a lighthouse as an object of profit.
A coal fire continued to light Dungeness till the completion of the now
existing lighthouse, 110 feet high, in 1792. Then eighteen sperm-oil
lamps took the place of the flickering fire, and shone steadily out to
sea. This third lighthouse at Dungeness was built under the direction of
Wyat, after the model of Smeaton’s lighthouse on the Eddystone. It now
stands more than five hundred yards from the high-water mark, though when
first it was built, it was barely a hundred, so rapidly has the neck of
shingle grown.
This increased distance was becoming somewhat misleading to passing
ships, so the Trinity House has placed a small revolving light nearer
the sea, and in connection with it a siren fog-horn, which latter was a
present from America. The utility of the fog-horn is great, though it
renders a foggy night spent in the neighbourhood of Dungeness anything
but tranquil.
But then, not many people—that is, people unused to the songs of the
modern sea siren—are likely to spend a night at or near Dungeness.
True, there is now a railway to it, and there are a few houses built
around the lighthouse. These are tenanted by people whose work is in
some way connected with it, with the coastguard duty, with Lloyds’
signalling station, with the new lifeboat, or with the Dutch ‘Consulate,’
an ambitious title bestowed upon a grocer’s shop whose fortunate owner
happens to have a patent from the Netherlands Government in connection
with signalling vessels of that nationality that pass the ‘Ness.’ These
people _are_, probably, pretty well used to the siren’s cries, which are
particularly frequent during autumn and winter nights, when fogs hang in
the Channel.
Some twenty years after the present lighthouse was built, a violent
storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, swept round it, and the
lightning, striking it, cracked it in such a way that it was at first
thought necessary to pull down the whole structure and set up a fresh
building in its stead. But the cracks were carefully filled up with
cement, the tower was bound round with iron hoops, barrel fashion, and
now it stands as firm as ever. If it is taken away, it will be because
Nature’s work in lengthening the shingle banks renders it useless where
it is.